The Foxhound of the Twentieth Century - The Breeding and Work of the Kennels of England

By Cuthbert Bradley

This vintage book contains a detailed account of the fox hound kennels in the United Kingdom between 1787 and 1912. A detailed history is provided for each kennel, including information concerning notable figures, events, and dogs. Other details are also offered relating to hunting, breeding, training, and more. "The Foxhound of the Twentieth Century" is highly recommended for modern hunting enthusiasts and fox hound lovers, and it would make for a worthy addition to collections of allied literature. Contents include: "The Puppy Walkers he Back-bone of Fox-hunting", "Periods in Hunting History between 1787 and 1912 which Influenced the Development of the Fox-hound", "The Symmetry of the Modern Foxhound", "The Northern Counties Hunts in Northumberland, Cumberland, Durham, and Westmorland", "The Yorkshire Hunts", "The North-Western Counties Hunts", et cetera. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with its original artwork and text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vintage Dog Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781473341470

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HUNTS

"As well as shape,

  Full well he knows,

  To kill their Fox

  They must have nose."

From N. C. H., Mr M‘Neill’s Hound List.

INTRODUCTION

SUCCESSIVE generations of sportsmen, the best and wisest of their time, developed the modern foxhound, a creation expressive of beauty, strength, and energy; whether regarded from the standpoint of the sportsman or the artist. The science of breeding and selection when forming a pack of hounds to match on the flags, and hunt together in the field, has been the life-long work of many illustrious sportsmen during the past two centuries. As a solace for old age such a study rivals even whist, for the fascination exceeds the limit of human life, and is an inspiring problem; a source of pleasure for the sportsman who has long ceased to take an active part in the chase. The great masters and huntsmen have been a long-lived race, and their memory is kept green for all time by the hounds they so skilfully bred, which are the corner-stones of modern day pedigrees. An enthusiastic sportsman of the past, a veteran master of hounds, who annually paid a pilgrimage to the Belvoir kennels to enjoy a sight of the ideal on the flags, was wont to say to Frank Gillard, Would that my grave could be under those flagstones, so that beautiful legs and feet might for ever be twinkling over me.

Foxhound breeding to-day rests on the source of purity of blood derived from four great kennels, which have always been the cherished possession of the same families, bred for generations on the same lines, and never dispersed. Little wonder is it that such fountain-heads are regarded by foxhound breeders as a National institution, and a deep debt of gratitude is due to the Dukes of Rutland at Belvoir, the Dukes of Beaufort at Badminton, the Earl of Yarborough at Brocklesby, and the Earl Fitzwilliams. Noted packs of hounds have been built up from these sources, to come and go, as owners changed and dispersal sales took place, but the history of fox-hunting is inseparably linked with the history of the great county families of England, who were the pioneers of the chase.

The foxhound has developed and kept pace with the times in a remarkable way, for the breeding, conditioning, and training of no other animal has been so carefully looked after. Change of ideas, and system of conducting the chase, have been very gradual in development, so that a page of hunting history referring to a hundred years ago, might almost stand for what is taking place to-day. The institution of the Foxhound Stud Book by Mr Cornelius Tongue—Cecil—published for the first time in 1864, dating back to 1787, was the first decisive step in the direction of scientific breeding generally. Since then progress has been continuous, and the present polished weapons of the chase surpass even their own standard of excellence. During the past fifty years fox-hunting has become a very popular institution, and Bailey’s annual Hunting Directory, which came into existence seventeen years ago, is a necessity that meets modern day requirements for information concerning the vast machinery which rules the working of the chase.

BELVOIR.

A review of the English kennels of foxhounds—which this season, 1913-14, number 176 packs, not including those of Scotland and Ireland—is here set forth with an endeavour to centre interest in the breeding and work of the present occupants of the benches.

For convenience, the map of England is divided into nine sections, grouping neighbouring counties, which are sub-divided into hunting territories. It will be seen that in each division there is one or more leading kennel from which neighbouring packs borrow blood to maintain the standard of the pack. We take this opportunity to tender our cordial thanks to many Masters of Hounds, huntsmen and others, for the assistance so kindly given in facilitating the putting together of this volume, containing as it does the expert opinion of those with a life-long experience on hunting.

Section A on the map of England includes the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, Durham, and Westmorland, with two leading kennels in the group, the Tynedale and Morpeth, which have long been a source for change of blood.

Section B is taken up by the county of Yorkshire which is sub-divided into the territories of eighteen different hunts. Lord Middleton’s famous kennel at Birdsall taking precedence with so much hereditary material therein.

Section C contains the North-Western counties of Cheshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Shropshire, and packs of hounds in North Wales. The famous kennels which have done so much to further the interests of hound breeding are Sir W. William Wynn’s, a great factor in the past, the Cheshire, and the Meynell to-day.

DIVISION OF HUNTING COUNTRY ON THE MAP OF ENGLAND.

Section D gives us the best in hounds and hunting, the mid-eastern counties of Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland, Northamptonshire, and Warwickshire known as the Shires. The seventeen packs in this famous group include the Belvoir, the Brocklesby, the Burton, the Atherstone, and the Warwickshire, each of which is a history of hound breeding in itself.

Section E contains the eastern counties of Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, with the Fitzwilliam and Oakley kennels as the tap-root for much excellence.

Section F represents a group of western counties including South Wales, Herefordshire, and Worcestershire. In the past the Croome played a very prominent part during Lord Coventry’s mastership.

Section G covers the mid-southern counties of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight. The Duke of Beaufort’s kennel at Badminton is pre-eminently great, and has built up the fortunes of many packs that have dipped into the blood.

Section H includes the south-eastern counties of Hertfordshire, Essex, Middlesex, Surrey, Kent, and Suffolk. The kennel with the strongest influence, when seeking improvement, is the Puckeridge.

Section I runs down to Land’s End and the wild tracts of England, the home of stag hunting. The counties in this division are Somersetshire, Devonshire, Dorsetshire, and Cornwall. The great kennels are Lord Portman’s, and the Cattistock.

It has been our good fortune to hunt all our time with the Belvoir, visit a great many kennels, and enjoy sport in a variety of countries, including three out of four of the great packs, the Duke of Rutland’s, the Duke of Beaufort’s, and Mr George Fitzwilliam’s.

The kennels of Scotland, Ireland, and the world at large have yet to be visited, but we hope to see a great deal more of fox-hunting and gain a wider experience for a future volume, for hound lore is inexhaustible in its interests.

For permission to reproduce pictures to illustrate this volume we thank the proprietors of The Field, Land and Water, The County Gentleman, and Baily’s Magazine.

CUTHBERT BRADLEY.

FORRARD! FORRARD!

THE FOXHOUND OF THE

TWENTIETH CENTURY

CHAPTER I

THE PUPPY WALKERS THE BACK-BONE OF FOX-HUNTING

"Sweet goddess! what music can most fittingly sing thee;

  What crescent thy lovely brow worthily grace?

  Our cubs—bless their brushes! the farmer has nourished,

  Our puppies his gudewife most lovingly reared."

—Baily’s Magazine.

AMONGST the best friends to fox-hunting in general, and the master of hounds in particular, must be ranged those who in sporting phraseology walk puppies. The institution is an old and honoured one, for we find there exists to this day in the Brocklesby kennel a list of puppies sent to walk in the year 1746, with the names of those who took them in. In theory it is a most delightfully sportsmanlike action to walk a foxhound puppy during the first year of his existence; in practice it is a most heartrending affair. Yet it is absolutely necessary for the future and making of a foxhound that the puppy should be sent from the kennel in which he was whelped, for a year’s run at a home where he can have plenty of room and liberty to develop frame and instincts. In the character and disposition of foxhound puppies and boys—and we speak from experience, having walked a couple at a time of each species—there is a striking similarity which prompted the great writer, Foster, to say, I never saw so much essence of devil put in so small a space.

The advantage of being well born and getting a good start in life are apparent to everybody, and Dame Fortune in the case of the foxhound puppy arranges all this by insuring a faultless pedigree and proportions of outline. Character a foxhound puppy is credited with inheriting from his dam, make and shape from his sire, and when the union has been planned on experienced scientific lines, with blood relationship blending on both sides, the child of promise may combine those cardinal virtues which distinguished ancestral foxhounds of a century ago. There is hardly a puppy to-day in whose veins does not lurk the blood of some or all of the great foxhounds of the past, for the race is one great family, very closely bred, branching out into different clans but never getting very far away from the parent tree. The difficulty nowadays would, we suppose, be to find whelps that are not in direct descent from Mr J. Corbet’s Trojan of 1783, the first hero of foxhound worship; Squire Osbaldeston’s Furrier of 1821, for the line of the little black and white dog comes into all the great pedigrees; or Belvoir Weathergage (1876), the acknowledged bed-rock of all modern day excellence in foxhound breeding.

Essence of devil in a small space.

The responsibilities of taking a puppy to walk are many; in the first place we become his sponsors for sport, and pledge ourselves to do our best to teach him his name, build up a stout frame and constitution, besides undertaking to pay for the indiscretions and annoyances he may commit on a neighbour’s premises. As his appetite grows, so also does his frame in a marvellous way, all traces of shyness disappear, and he quickly assumes that surroundings were made for his own special gratification and amusement. As Ben Capell used to say when sending out his youngsters from Belvoir, Look after them well for the first two months, and then, if they have a drop of Belvoir blood in them, they will look after themselves. A foxhound is a freebooter by instinct, a capital forager; picking up all sorts of things he should not, is his besetting sin; chasing chickens, hares, and rabbits on other people’s property his constant occupation. In the shires a foxhound puppy is regarded in the same light as the Brahmin does the sacred bull; he is undoubtedly the gentleman of his race, and his aristocratic bearing saves him from many a well-deserved hiding. All sorts of naughtiness and evil-doings are laid to his door by right-minded people, who regard a foxhound puppy as they do a growing schoolboy, the very essence of iniquity. But the farmer who sent in a pup from walk with the remark, He ought to be a very good hound, because he ate the missus’s petticoat and prayer-book, was a sterling good sportsman, who thoroughly understood human nature. It is a well-known fact that the most mischievous puppies and boys grow up to become the most useful in after life, for it is the active brain that prompts mischief, and when this has been developed and disciplined it stands for good work later on. Like all gigantically sinful people, the foxhound puppy wears an easy air of perpetual and exaggerated innocence that tends to put the unwary off their guard. He plays the game, lives every minute of his life, spending his time when at walk, hunting, feeding, or sleeping, the freedom of action and range of possibilities combining to make the hound fit to carry on the supremacy of an illustrious kennel. Without the assistance of the puppy walker, success in hound breeding, or the maintaining of the high standard of a pack, is absolutely impossible, so that puppy walkers have been very rightly styled the backbone of fox-hunting.

The large percentage of those who walk puppies but do not hunt is a very striking fact, illustrating the largeness of heart and unselfishness that exists amongst the dwellers of the country side.

Many hunts send out to walk each season the best part of a hundred couple of puppies, the farmers and tradesmen resident in the country being given first chance to take a puppy, and to their credit very few remain for the gentry to walk. Former Dukes of Rutland made it a rule for all tenants on the estate to walk foxhound puppies, and it has always been regarded as a privilege, not a hardship. The existing fact, that walks for foxhounds are to be found in plenty amongst the middle and lower classes of the country-side, is only another proof of the Democratic spirit which has always existed since the chase was established. In like manner the passing of the old-world trencher-fed pack is to be regretted, because this rough and ready arrangement of bygone ages, billeting hounds on the followers of a hunt, had the advantages of giving everybody a vested interest in the sport, and much of the love of hound-lore and hunting disappeared with the banishment of the old venatic institution. Walking a puppy is immensely popular, and although the number of hounds bred nowadays is perhaps four times as many more than was the case fifty years ago, yet there is a billet to be found for every one of them. As a nation we are keen as ever for fox-hunting, the love of which we inherit in our blood from ancestors who hunted to live, and although one in fifty may be the average of those who can ride with the chase, yet the other forty-nine love a foxhound. The charm of fox-hunting is that it has never been exclusive, for it must never rank as the rich man’s game, and the puppy walker is the last man in a national institution that the chase can manage to do without.

An Aristocrat.

To-day the lady of the household is the greatest asset to fox-hunting, for she it is of late years who has adopted the puppy into the bosom of the family, and a higher standard of excellence has been established throughout the kennels of England. As often as not, as the saying is, the missus is master, so that if the lady of the house looks unfavourably on the sport of kings, a breach of the peace is endangered, and next season’s good walks may be hard to find. Mere man, who had a puppy walking on his premises, was once heard to remark to the huntsman, when sending him into kennel, I doubt he won’t be of much use to you, he’s for ever after the girls! The huntsman, however, thought otherwise, for next season he sent the breeding from the best stuff in the kennel to that particular walk! The run of a good larder, dairy, and chicken-pen has built up the splendid specimens which today are stars in the foxhound firmament, and the memory of the good walker will be kept green in the annals of the chase, long after marble and such like tributes have perished. There are more than two hundred packs of hounds in the United Kingdom, whose expenditure is from £50 up to £10,000 a year, so that puppy walkers may be counted by thousands.

The foxhound puppy goes into kennel from walk about March, when the lambs are beginning to arrive, because the risk in a sheep-rearing country would be too great a responsibility to incur. Those that are billeted in towns remain at walk much longer, for the freedom is all in favour of development, and although we have opinioned that a farm offers the best of all walks for a puppy, yet it is often the hotel-keeper or the butcher of a neighbouring town who carries off the much coveted cup. Some seasons ago the two prize puppies of the Quorn entry were walked by good sportsmen living in the towns of Leicester and Loughborough. Mr Sherwin, a corn merchant in Leicester, won the cup on this occasion with Gauntlet, and in an excellent speech at the prize-giving luncheon, said: I had a bad quarter of an hour when the judges had out the last three; I don’t care now; I only wish I had a horse good enough to ride to Gauntlet and her fellows; you who have may catch her if you can. There are thousands who walk puppies year by year and never win a prize for doing so, yet are quite content if their protégé is of sufficient merit to gain an entry in the pack. The disappointments are in greater proportion than the prizes, the mortality from distemper and other ailments taking a terrible toll of puppies when at walk. As an instance which will illustrate many another, the entries for 1911, all over the country, were not numerically strong, for the wet winter was in a great measure the cause of great mortality amongst young hounds. Of 70 couples sent out to walk by Lord Middleton, only 30 couples were returned to kennels. After further loss owing to distemper, and the drafting of those not up to the standard of merit, Tom Bishopp put forward nine couple of dogs, and six couple of bitches.

A puppy may be sent into kennel, fat as a bacon pig, nothing having been considered too good to bring about his development; he may, however, be beaten at the prize-giving by one that has not been so well done, but from the fact that he stands right and carries his bone down, he turns out to be the winner. It is but an illustration of the luck attached to most affairs in life, and cannot be regarded as a hardship, for every sportsman likes to see the best win on his merits. So in puppy walking as in riding to hounds the best goes first if he can, and the protégé of the roadman may beat that of the baronet, if he is good enough. When Lady Greenall came to Belvoir as the wife of the master, she solved the difficulty by presenting an extra cup to the walker of the puppy which was considered in the best condition when sent into kennel, and the prize was very much appreciated, besides having an enormons influence on the standard of subsequent entries.

It is generally the custom of different hunts in the United Kingdom to hold their annual puppy judging in the autumn, by which time they look level in condition, are over the worst of their troubles, and have shed their puppy coats.

The best receipt for walking a puppy is absolute liberty, with a dry bed at night, new milk, and biscuit, the rest he will forage for himself, for a foxhound is an adept at begging and looks his best when so occupied. At the first symptom of sickness he should be treated as a child, kept in a warm, even temperature, and given the best of kitchen physic. When Frank Gillard sent the Belvoir puppies out to walk, they arrived with a packet of his famous distemper compound, and a little gilt spoon with which to administer the same. In the early days of infancy it is advisable to see that a puppy does not have to climb up into his bed, or jump down on to a hard floor, otherwise he may damage the shape of his legs and feet, the all essential points in the symmetry of a foxhound. One good lady with a baby asked how she should feed the pup. With what’s left in the baby’s bottle, replied the master; give the tit first to one then the other.

Notable orators and statesmen have been at their happiest moments addressing the puppy walkers, the late Duke of Rutland, Lord John Manners, delighting to support Sir Gilbert Greenall on these occasions, during his mastership to the Belvoir hounds. Talking of the excellence of the hounds reminded him of a pretty but pathetic story, said the venerable statesman, told to him as a boy. One of the famous hunstmen, Thomas Goosey, when he retired from active life, spent the rest of his days in a cottage at Woolsthorpe. There was a garden at the back, looking towards the green hill which sloped up from the village of Woolsthorpe to Belvoir. In the early summer mornings his not less famour successor, Will Goodall, used to bring the hounds for exercise by the garden gate. The old gentleman, seated in his chair, took his hat off, and remained uncovered until hounds had passed out of sight. That, he thought, was a pretty story, and he was not altogether indisposed to think that perhaps there might be some enthusiastic sportsmen in the company, and some admirable, perhaps even critical, judges of hounds, who when they met the Belvoir pack might feel inclined to take their hats off, believing that when they saw them, they represented about as good a type of the noble animal, the English foxhound, as they were likely to see in the course of their natural lives.

A Matron of the Kennel.

The puppy show is a prize baby show so far as the lady walker is concerned, speech day for the houndman who makes intricate calculations as to what sort of a hound the puppy will grow into. Undoubtedly these show days at kennels are of great service to the cause of rearing young hounds, and the furtherance of good feeling throughout the district in which hounds hunt. A puppy walking community is drawn from all ranks and callings in life, the occasion being productive of the most delightful freemasonry, though not one in ten of the assembly ever take any active part in the chase. Still they are great hearted sportsmen, sponsors for the future of the kennel, glad of an opportunity to see the puppy they walked happy and settled in life. The great professors of fox-hunting are there to judge the merits of the young hounds on the flags, and the keenest rivalry exists, for if your protégé is not fortunate to win the prize, it is something to know he was good enough to lick the representative sent in by a neighbour. The hunt servants in the